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About Karen Gilston

I’m Karen Gilston and for the first 40 years of my life my biggest bucket item was to sit on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and look at the Golden Gate Bridge, with Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” playing in my ears. I never even knew if this was physically possible. Although I was born and brought up in the United Kingdom I always had an infinity to the U.S.

At the age of three, when my mom was pregnant with my brother, I was shipped off to my grandmother’s every weekend, during her final few months. My grandmother, bless her, not being very maternal, had absolutely no toys for me to play with. But she did have a pile of National Geographic magazines, which I hasten to add was taller than me. I would sit and wade through every National Geographic she owned, and learned very early on how not to rip a page despite my young age. As a consequence I spent many hours entranced, just looking at the pictures of this amazing planet, and since then all I’ve ever wanted to do was travel.

Dreaming of the Golden Gate

Even now I clearly remember the first picture of the Golden Gate Bridge I ever saw. And I spent the next 30 odd years dreaming of traveling to see that Golden Gate. Eventually my dream came true, and in my early 40s my husband and I moved to the States.

The standing joke in our house is that I would visit a dripping tap (faucet) as long as it involved travel. Although there are still many places in the world I want to see, my move to America meant I could finally get to see those places I only saw in the magazines.

Just so you will know where I’m coming from, I had my own interior design business in the UK and now I spend my time photographing the architecture and interiors that I love.